Kindness counts! That was the theme of this very short week. We donned our pink shirts, read some great books about kindness, and enjoyed a schoolwide assembly with the theme of being kind. The RCMP even came to visit! Later, we each drew on a sticky note our ideas of how we could be kind and then walked over to the police station to paste them on their window. But, shhhh!!!... Madame missed the memo that there were pink sticky notes at the office for this activity (pink shirt day = pink sticky notes) and we just used the yellow ones she had in her classroom. It was a classic scenario of the teacher being just as bad as the students at following directions. But!... Madame explained very logically that we were just beeeee-ing kind (think bumblebee) with our notes so the yellow was perfectly appropriate. ;-) We were so delighted to meet the RCMP officers that many of us brought pieces of paper to get their autographs. Thursday was our last day with our Katzie friend, Lilly, who has been teaching us to drum to a song that she wrote about her ancestors. We made her a big "thank you" card, or hay čxʷ q̓ə, as they say in the Katzie language. And we are now ready to go out into the world and sing her song! We're looking forward to trying a drumming circle in the forest one day! We have been busy this week glueing art into our portfolios and picking out assignments that we're proud of to be able to share them with our parents during conferences. While doing this, some of us noticed that we were coincidentally wearing exactly the same outfits as we were when we first created an art piece a month ago! And hey, did you know that February is "Black History" month?? We're late to this theme because February flies by with all the other things to celebrate, but better late than never! Today we learned about Viola Davis, the woman on our $10 bill, as well as Eleanor Collins, a Canadian jazz singer from BC. We were so intrigued by their history and had lots of great questions! We were especially fascinated to learn that Eleanor Collins is a distant relative of a family in our school! In Math, we have been practicing a mental math strategy this week with doubles. If we know that 5 + 5 = 10, then we can know that 5 + 6 = 11 without even having to count because 6 is just one more than 5. Doubles+1 and Doubles+2 are great strategies for adding in our heads, but it can take some time to wrap our brains around the concept. To help us solidify our knowledge of just doubles in general, Madame introduced us to a song she made a couple of years ago with her kids. She apologizes in advance for her cringe-worthy voice in this one. She thought she was singing her heart out like a Backstreet Boy (she had the arm movements and everything behind the scenes...her daughter was embarrassed for her), but it turns out that she was more like a croaky frog. At least the kids are cute! And like with every song, the goal is just to have a catchy tune so that we get it stuck in our head and learn the information without even needing to try! Sneaky, sneaky Madame! No better way to kick off a week than with a giant sugar rush. Heh. Somewhere along the way, Valentine’s Day became pretty much as big of a deal as Halloween and we all sure revelled in our spoils while very clearly ignoring Madame’s “eat only one candy each before going home” policy. Even the guinea pigs got spoiled with vegetable and fruit treats!! 😉 Thankfully, the weather was glorious and we got to spend the afternoon running off our sugar highs and exploring a new park – Mitchell Rd. Apparently several dozen other students also thought this would be a good idea. It was very fun for some of us to run into siblings and cousins! We took the long way back to school so that we could cut through the forest path. We’ve decided that we definitely need to come back to this space soon, just to spend more time playing in the woods! We’ve had some new toys in our classroom recently! (A huge “merci” to Revolution Pump Service Ltd. for the gifts!) We are loving trying all kinds of Rubik’s cubes and learning more about the world with a LeapFrog interactive globe! A little screen with BBC videos teaches us all about animals, landmarks, cultures, geography, etc as we tap on the various countries and continents. At snack time, we’ve been asking Madame to give us some extra Math challenges. We’re loving the extra practice doing addition with carrying numbers, and subtraction with borrowing. We get better and better every day! On Thursday, we got to teach our big buddies the Indigenous song we’ve been learning, gifted to us by Lillie from the Katzie First Nation. It was so fun to be able to pass along our knowledge! In French, Madame has us starting to analyze sentences, looking for masculine and feminine nouns, as well as adjectives. We are beginning to notice how the adjectives agree with the nouns that they describe. (Secretly, Madame is just teaching all this grammatical blah-dee-blah because she wants to play “Mad Libs” with us when we become experts on the various parts of speech… well, that and it’s part of the curriculum.) In Art, we've been flexing our people-drawing skills by attempting to draw our families in honour of "Family Day" this weekend. Some of us did this assignment last year, but it's always interesting to see how our drawing skills progress from one year to the next! Extra photos...
It's "Carnaval" week! What is "Carnaval"? … a week-long festival in Quebec that celebrates winter, culture, and tradition with all kinds of fun activities. Madame asked us: "Where is Quebec?" And we had all kinds of answers, ranging from England to Australia to France. We were shocked to learn that Quebec is actually a part of our own country of Canada, and that we may even get to travel there on a "field trip" when we're in Grade 7! We had fun finding it on Google Earth and seeing how far away it is from where we live. One of the most important symbols of "Carnaval" is the "Bonhomme Carnaval" (the official snowman of Carnaval) and the "ceinture fléchée" (the sash worn around his waist). These sashes used to be part of the outfit French-Canadian fur traders wore on trading missions, but even before the French arrived in Canada, Indigenous people were using finger-weaving to create belts such as these which could be worn not only as a belt, but also as a scarf, or used as a rope, a tool belt, etc. Madame had us learn to do our own finger-knitting, and with the help of our big buddies, we created our own "ceinture fléchées". It was a tricky craft to learn, but some of us managed to produce some incredible pieces! We had so much fun with it that Madame kept the yarn in the classroom all week for us to try out more creations during our free time. On Wednesday, as part of a team challenge, we created our own "bonhommes carnaval" and got to put the "ceinture fléchées" that we made around their waists. This was actually a very difficult task because it required a delicate touch… something most of us 6 to 8-year-olds do not possess. Too much pressure and the whole thing would fall apart. Madame pumped us up ahead of time with the message that we are a TEAM and we need to help and encourage each other. The most beautiful thing to come out of this exercise was not the snowmen, themselves (as impressive and adorable as some of them actually were!), but mainly that not a single group fought or yelled at each other during the process. Madame actually did hear words of encouragement coming from us. We cheered each other's successes and helped each other when our snowballs fell apart rather than blaming one another. In September, this would not have been our reality. Thursday was ice sculpture time. One of the coolest features of the real "Carnaval" is the incredibly ornate ice sculptures that adorn the landscape. We decided to create our own using sugar cubes rather than ice… another delicate and difficult task that didn't always go according to plan, but we adapted and worked well together! Extra non-ice-resembling accessories may have been added along the way, too. ;-) And to wrap up our "Carnaval"-themed week, we harnessed one of the most fun aspects of the festival and had a snowball fight! Now we know Madame must be certifiably crazy! We also found a pocket of sunshine this week to head to Eagle Park! It was fun to switch up our nature walk location and discover another local park. And it was especially fun to come across this special Valentine's Day tree!! Thank you, Nana Kesler, for giving us hand-made bookmarks after going for a walk with us!! Normally our class pets, Biscuit and Pépite the guinea pigs, stay in a cage on the back counter of our classroom, but on Monday Madame let us have them on the floor for most of the day! This allowed us to interact with them so much more than normal and we loved seeing them run through the tunnel and play. Some of us even managed to pet them.
Living those beach dreams as we look outside at the dreary winter weather. We took the solar system to the sky in our classroom this week, creating planet mobiles to hang from the ceiling. The results may not be 100% to scale, but we are quite pleased with the results. A big “merci” goes out to our big buddies for helping us tie a lot of string! Next time Madame will need to remember to make it shorter. Tuesday was our walking field trip to the Pitt Meadows Library! We thoroughly enjoyed this experience, from the crazy interactive story that we did with the librarian, to checking out all the many different styles of Rubik’s cubes, all of the activities available, picking out the perfect book… The trip was given a resounding “thumbs up”! And did you know you can borrow Rubik’s cubes, telescopes, binoculars, and music-making tech from the library?? Madame definitely learned some things, too, on this trip! And happy February! How are we here already? It wouldn’t be the beginning of February without checking in on our groundhog friends. We read a French book to review this silly North American tradition and then, with the help of a flashlight, learned about what makes shadows appear or not appear. Thanks to YouTube, we were able to check in on our furry friends across Canada and it seems that the overall consensus is that we are in for 6 more weeks of winter. Boo!... let’s bring out the beach day wear for longer and continue to live in our dream world. The "Castors" team in our class was awarded with medals today for bringing in the top points for our group challenges so far this year. Bravo! We sang their team chant and applauded all their hard work. Next week we will restart at "0" for another set of challenges. In Math, we have learning about what it actually means when 9 + 1 “equals” 10, for example. …both sides of the equation are balanced, just like on a scale. We had fun playing with Madame’s monkey scale to see what kinds of equations and other random things we could manage to balance. In Art, we are going to start spotlighting some famous artists and their best known pieces. We started today with Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night". We learned a bit about Van Gogh's life and history and then made some observations about the brushstrokes in his art. We noticed that he used short brushstrokes that all go in the same direction and that he blended colours. We had fun using oil pastels to try to create a similar effect. It was especially fun to blend the colours and some of us even tried some different techniques like scratching the pastels with our fingernails or a paperclip to reveal bits of colour that we had layered. We didn't all attempt to stay true to Van Gogh's colour scheme, but that's okay! It's our own interpretation of an artistic idea. In French, Madame continues to push us to write more, more, more! Some of us are really getting good at filling a page, and not just with randomly placed words, but actual thought-out sentences. Is the spelling perfect? NO!... but we don’t care! At this stage, even in Grade 2, Madame is more concerned with “inventive spelling” which shows that we actually understand how letter sounds and combinations work to be able to piece together words and make meaning. Proper spelling rules will be taught in later years, once we have grasped the preliminary mechanics. You can't build an engine properly and reliably if you don't first understand how/why the parts fit together. Extra photos...
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